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THE new Ashton Gate vaccination hub could be opened 24 hours a day – but the man in charge of the facility cast doubt on whether there would be the demand from people to get the vaccine in the middle of the night.
The NHS centre, which was visited by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday, is initially open 12 hours each day, seven days a week, with the target to vaccinate 10,000 people a week by next week.
But questions have been raised about why the centre is not for longer hours, or even through the night, to vaccinate the maximum number of people possible in the quickest possible time.
As the Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited the Ashton Gate hub on Monday, a Number 10 spokesperson suggested that there wasn’t ‘the clamour’ for round-theclock vaccines and people signing up to have the jab in the middle of the night.
But when the Post website Bristol Live asked people on Facebook if they would, it was overwhelmed with responses from people saying they would be absolutely fine with heading to Ashton Gate in the middle of the night to get their jab.
More than 800 people responded in just a few hours to our question, and all but a handful said they would drop everything to get the jab at 3am, if it was available.
Sean Donnelly, the landlord of the Three Lions pub in Bedminster, who has added the silhouette of a nurse with a vaccination jab to the artwork on the front of his West Street pub, backed the move to open up Ashton Gate 24 hours a day. “Definitely,” he said. “I would accept a flight at 3am, so I’ll accept a jab at 3am.”
The man in charge of the operation to vaccinate as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, Tim Whittlestone, said it was a ‘complex equation’ of matching the supply of the vaccine with the demand.
Mr Whittlestone, the clinical lead for mass vaccination in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, said they would be ramping up the number of vaccinations the centre at Ashton Gate would be carrying out, so it would reach its 10,000 jabs a week by the end of next week.
“This is just one part of our facility to vaccinate everyone – we’re ploughing ahead with vaccinations in primary care. We’ve got 19 primary care centres up and running and vaccinating,” he said.
“We’ve got three hospital hubs up and running and doing extremely well – so please bear with us. You will have some choice, increasingly, as to where you can have this vaccination. Hopefully together, this is the final chapter of the Covid pandemic. We will get through this, we will all get vaccinated,” he added.
In terms of whether the Ashton
Gate hub should be open 24 hours a day, Mr Whittestone said it would be a balance between demand and supply of the vaccine.
“We are operating 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “We can (move to 24 hours a day) if it is required. Currently, our local modelling suggests we don’t need to do that. But we are ready to pick up the pace, if we need to. So we will await further instructions.
“It’s a question of matching the demand and the capacity with the supply of the vaccine, so it’s quite a complex equation.
“If we had a very low take-up in the middle of the night, for example, it’s clearly not worthwhile to be open all through the night but we are prepared to do so, if there is the demand and there is the supply of the vaccine.
“We would (have supply of the vaccine), but we’d just get through it a lot quicker in fewer days, wouldn’t we?” he added.
“I think it’s important we take careful steps at this stage, to make sure everything works well. There’s a whole new team of staff in there, whole new processes, whole new IT systems, so it’s quite important that we proceed at the pace that everybody is comfortable with, including the people who are wanting the vaccine,” he said.
The vaccination programme in the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire area is understood to be aiming to have covered all care home workers and carers, and the over-80s, by the middle of February, with other elderly and at risk groups following after.
With 10,000 jabs a week at Ashton Gate and a programme across 19 other primary care centres it could still be well into the summer or autumn that people under 50 without any underlying health conditions begin to be vaccinated.